I just had a violent lunch with Michael Medved and his Lebanese interlocutor. The Lebanese guy implicitly defended Hezbollah and Medved was giving him hell about it. Medved had implicitly attacked Muslims and the Lebanese guy was giving him hell about it. Hellified stuff, but it didn't make my Carl's Jr burger any less appetizing as I chilled in the WalMart parking lot with the AC on full blast.
As I continued part of the conversation in my own head on my way back to this beloved keyboard, I wondered whether in fact we are spending the right amount of money on Homeland Security and if we should worry about Hezbollah here. I think not. I don't see what Hezbollah might seek to gain by doing their dirt here. I mean there's nothing about the geography anywhere near the mythical Caliphate sought by islamic fascists. Now that they've pissed off the Lion and bit off more than they can chew in their own backyard, what makes them think they can do any damage here? Maybe they're just that crazy, but I'm really not concerned. Still, if anything comes of this latest threat it only goes to prove that Hezbollah is hardly interested in defense, but in offense.
But on the subject of Homeland Security, it is by definition a measured response. Homeland Security wouldn't get any money if we were an old style nation. I mean let's overuse the whole WW2 analogy for a moment. Why do we have Gitmo at all? Because we believe at base that Zawahiri and Bin Laden can be found and it's worth torturing and rending combattants for torture so we can bust up the AQ Cells and Leadership. Yeah we say we don't but there is a real intelligence operation going. Yeah we take them off the battlefield and hold them indefinitely, and we're way within our rights to do so even post-Hamdan. But we wanna ask them tough, even torturous questions and that's a good thing. Why? Because the alternative to extracting pinpoint information is bombing civilians. Huh?
I really want people who are outraged at the number of civilian casualties in Lebanon to consider this question very seriously. Is it better to have a systematic system of torture for the purposes of finding tactical information on the location and facilities of the enemy, or to bomb extra hard and hope your bombs hit the right targets?
Did we spend a whole lot of time looking for Hitler? No. We didn't care about finding Hitler. We do care about finding Osama. So the GWOT is still proceding like a heavy-handed roughneck police action. The alternative is to do proxy battles (as we may be doing through Israel, now) and bombing civilians. But we are not bombing the states that support AQ and Global Islamic Fascism although we've clearly called them Outlaw States. We're not doing to Muslims what the Russians have done to Chechans. We are not doing to Muslim states what Bosnians have done to each other.
But we may have tortured a few dozen suspects, and that's much better.
Of course that's too much for those who put the priorities of civil liberty over those of national defense. And while I agree that our national defense is not under dire, clear and present danger, we are at war in two states, and the threats against us continue. The erosions of civil liberty don't seem dire either.
So what can we do? We can bomb outlaw states, we can fight proxy wars, we can torture captives, we can bug and search telephone records. We're doing the least noxious of all.
I can't end on that note because the fact that we are relatively restrained in our processing of this conflict is not the best justification, and our overproductions and straight out blunders cannot be adequately judged from that perspective. And I'm not necessarily going to take anybody's word that we're doing the best we can do under the circumstances. So over the next few weeks I'm going to attempt to get a closer look at what's going on in Iraq and how that relates to the GWOT in light of what Israel's doing. I think I'm bound to be disappointed, because I was struck by something I heard yesterday, basically that Iraq is now mired in the very sectarian warfare that was the aim of the insurgency. I want to know what is the balance of power in Iraq on a kind of Lebanon scale. How destabilized could Iraq become after an American pullout?
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